Showing results for "you" in History

In this audiobook, you'll find the maddest, strangest and downright grossest stories from history and science that you don't want to know. (Except secretly you really do you masochistic, beastly person you.) Painfully funny and drop-your-jaw ridiculous, this is trivia from the cesspit of time that you won't be able to stop listening once you start.

Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth’s deserts. If you weigh 150 pounds, you’ve got enough carbon to make 25 pounds of charcoal, enough salt to fill a saltshaker, enough chlorine to disinfect several backyard swimming pools, and enough iron to forge a 3-inch nail. But how did these elements combine to make us human?

Tim Coulson – Professor of Zoology at Oxford – takes us back to the beginning of everything: the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. From there, he leads us step by step along the path to the most astonishing thing we have yet encountered – the staggering complexity of the modern human mind. Covering physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, the emergence of life, evolution, consciousness and the rise of humankind, yet written to be understood by anyone with a child’s curiosity, this book takes the biggest story of all and tells it simply, grippingly and, above all, entertainingly.

The story of the rise of modern navigation technology, from radio location to GPS—and the consequent decline of privacy. What does it mean to never get lost? You Are Here examines the rise of our technologically aided era of navigational omniscience—or how we came to know exactly where we are at all times. Filled with tales of scientists and astronauts, inventors and entrepreneurs, You Are Here tells the story of how humankind ingeniously solved one of its oldest and toughest problems—only to herald a new era in which it’s impossible to hide.

Upon completing his historic work on the Human Genome Project in 2002, J. Craig Venter declared that he would sequence the genetic code of all life on earth. Thus began a fifteen-year quest to collect DNA from the world's oldest and most abundant form of life: microbes. Boarding the Sorcerer II, a 100-foot sailboat turned research vessel, Venter travelled over 65,000 miles around the globe to sample ocean water and the microscopic life within. In this book, Venter and science writer David Ewing Duncan tell the remarkable story of these expeditions and of the momentous discoveries that ensued.

For two decades, Matt Kaplan has covered science for the Economist. He’s seen breakthroughs often occur in spite of, rather than because of, the behavior of the research community, and how support can be withheld for those who don’t conform or have the right connections. In this passionately argued and entertaining book, Kaplan narrates the history of the 19th century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who realized that Childbed fever—a devastating infection that only struck women who had recently given birth—was spread by doctors not washing their hands.

Why are we cruel? Why are we kind? Charles Darwin, the father of modern biology, wrestled with these very questions in order to explain the human race, struggling to fit a loving God into a harsh and challenging universe. Animal behavior scientist and evolutionary biologist Jacob Johnson’s entertaining new take on Darwin’s work explores his crisis of faith, the origin of morality and the evolution of “good” and “evil.”